Importance of penetration testing and spam filters

For a long time internet allowed users to fully utilize its resources. It added all the possible convenience to our lives. Soon organizations, especially Information Technology started to bloom owing to the fast communication. Goods could be sold online and customers were happy with online payment. But the situation started to change. The advent of worms, Trojans, etc. became a serious menace with unauthorized security intrusion. Developers therefore devised penetration testing software to bring these under control. Everyday billions of unwanted e-mails are released in the internet worldwide. They use forged named, misleading subject lines and inaccurate sender address. These e-mails contains virus, which has the potential to cause a financial damage in the order of millions, in an organization. To protect our mailbox from spam, spam filters should be included in our system security tools.

In Penetration testing every information system in your computer will be tested in order to detect any sort of security problems in them. Hackers can cause companies to lose money and client as well as promote bad PR. Penetration testing involves assessing the systems where the information is being stored, the transmission lines or network that is responsible for transmission of this information and also the people or employees handling the whole process; This practically includes the dynamic websites, applications, operating systems, databases, networking equipments, telephony, wireless instruments like WIFI, RFID, GSM, Bluetooth, etc.

Penetration testing may involve pseudo attacks on the system i.e. ethical hackers who will try to find a way to enter your system. The most important part of Penetration testing is the report generation part. It is in the report that the weaknesses of the system shall be judged. The vulnerabilities of the system are listed along with the possible solution for each. There have been cases where the penetration testers have been fraudulent; always take services from a known company.

Spam filters blocks all unsolicited mails from entering our inbox. Spammers find it economically viable as they have minimum operating costs in sending the messages. Moreover, in most states it is legal as nobody can punish someone for mass mailing. This has led to a situation where spammers are increasing in number and so are their mails. Moreover, it is easy to find e-mail address through chat rooms, websites and newsgroups. Only for a few dollars these e-mail address can also be purchased. As the spammers are finding new ways to spread spam in our system, use of spam filters has become very important.

Spam filters look for certain headers or keywords in the incoming emails to check for spam. It blocks the mails which are reducing time as well as productivity. Spam e-mails are never customized. It is just one mail that has multiple copies. If a message has been sent to others person as well, the spam filter might consider it as spam. Spam filters look for certain expressions and patterns. It assigns points to these detected patters; if the total value exceeds a threshold value, the e-mail is blocked.

Using good spam filters does bring down spam to almost 80% but it should be remembered that it is not 100% error free. Occasionally, it might block a legitimate e-mail by confusing it with spam. Penetration testing should be performed regularly with updating the database with newer versions of programs.